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Description
Leivanectes albertoi is a recently described (February 2019) elasmosaurid from the South American Paja formation, an interesting formation with an interesting array of marine reptiles (the giant 10 m pliosaur Sachicasaurus vitae from the same formation was also described this year).
Leivanectes is a rather fragmentary but distinctive elasmosaurid that is phylogenetically quite close to Thalassomedon, of which Scott Hartman conveniently had a skeletal restoration making scaling it fairly straightforward.
From the preserved anterior skull we have it is clear this elasmosaur had large teeth and the largest and fewest tooth sockets of any described elasmosaur, indicating it had robust teeth fit for tackling larger prey than other elasmosaurs, which would probably be mostly large fishes.

The orange circle denotes the place the eye would have been in life, I added it because otherwise it´d be hard to see where to put it and that´s handy to have in a reference.

I do not own the base skeletal that was used in making this scaling, it belongs to
www.skeletaldrawing.com/non-di…

Reference:
www.researchgate.net/publicati…

Description
Leivanectes albertoi is a recently described (February 2019) elasmosaurid from the South American Paja formation, an interesting formation with an interesting array of marine reptiles (the giant 10 m pliosaur Sachicasaurus vitae from the same formation was also described this year).
Leivanectes is a rather fragmentary but distinctive elasmosaurid that is phylogenetically quite close to Thalassomedon, of which Scott Hartman conveniently had a skeletal restoration making scaling it fairly straightforward.
From the preserved anterior skull we have it is clear this elasmosaur had large teeth and the largest and fewest tooth sockets of any described elasmosaur, indicating it had robust teeth fit for tackling larger prey than other elasmosaurs, which would probably be mostly large fishes.

The orange circle denotes the place the eye would have been in life, I added it because otherwise it´d be hard to see where to put it and that´s handy to have in a reference.

I do not own the base skeletal that was used in making this scaling, it belongs to
www.skeletaldrawing.com/non-di…

Reference:
www.researchgate.net/publicati…